A very connish weekend

I had such a wonderful time in Melbourne over the weekend. Was fantastic to spend quality time with good friends and get to know some people some more. I could write a bunch of stuff, but there was a great back channel happening so I storified instead 🙂

Friday I attended #writingwhilefemale as part of the Emerging Writers Festival. The presentations were great, generally, and even better was the company (Alisa, Katharine, Helen & Jane, with bonus Alex at lunch!).

https://storify.com/editormum75/writingwhilefemale-melbourne-2015









And once that was over, we had Continuum 11! Sold books, hung out, was on some panels. Excellent programming and more great company!

https://storify.com/editormum75/my-continuum-11

Thanks to the organisers of both events for a fab weekend, a and to all the tweeters I pulled into the Storifys above. Also Katharine for room sharing and top table duties, as always, and to anyone who brought me tea & snacks through the weekend 🙂 Was a blast!

Blogging, what is it?

i had occasion today to take a trip down memory lane through the archives of this blog. Well, actually most of the archives were those transferred from WordPress a couple of years back, when LiveJournal was dying, but regardless of that, they are MY archives. It was a fascinating exercise in cringe (did I say THAT?!), memory loss (did I even WRITE that?!) and a little bit of chuffed (huh, THAT was actually pretty good…). The thing that struck me the most, though, was the sheer number of posts. I started blogging at LiveJournal in 2007 and for several years posted several times a week. There’s memes, book reviews, con reports, family posts, publishing stuff, everything. Now? The last time I updated this blog was April, at the end of the holidays. The FableCroft site gets more attention (that’s business), and the school sites I run get a little, but not a patch on those halcyon days of yesteryear. 



Why is that? I blame Twitter. Facebook to, to an extent, but i think it was after joining Twitter that I stopped blogging with any frequency. To be fair, the apparent death of LJ didn’t help, because blogging within LJ gave a different sense of community to WordPress, one that I think Twitter emulates in many ways. So a combination of those elements, I suppose. Add to that I now use Goodreads to record my reading/reviews, and Facebook to keep up with family and friends, blogging really doesn’t serve the same purpose anymore. Social media has moved on, and will, I’m sure, continue to do so. Twitter will no doubt be superceded some day, just as LJ was. Facebook will is under the weight of public disdain, as did MySpace. I wonder where we’ll be finding our communities in 10 years from now?